author here. currently in touch with persona's CEO as mentioned on twitter, part 2 and 3 coming soon. i understand the criticism on the design of the site but it has no place here on hackernews. the content is what matters. i designed my website to be an experience rather than sanitized white on black minimalist slop, whether you like it or not is completely fair, then just use reading mode in your browser.

I loved it, I’ve never seen something like it

thank you!! this website was made loooong ago before gpt3 was even a thing lol (saying this because people thought it was vibecoded lol), the design of it brings me joy and i wouldn't change it for anything

I enjoyed the website.

I love your site design, but please consider that people may not take your content seriously because it is so expressive. It is cool looking but hard to concentrate on the actual content. This is distracting from the point you are making and makes it harder to circulate this to non-tech peoples.

An experience yes but one that is noisy to the information you’re trying to expose.

Deflecting criticism of the noisiness because you want to focus on the content is just creating another distraction to discuss instead of the content. The cat, the music, the lowercase text, low contrast color scheme all create a layer of “is this serious?”

i agree but this is why journalists and the media pick up on this - i'm doing the technical writeup, other reputable sources do the normie stuff

also while yes i agree that it could raise questions about "is this serious?" to be honest i believe my track record in the field is enough to outweigh the design of my site. i designed this website when i was a teenager, many years ago, to express my vibe and soul, and i would much rather it stay that way even if it makes it seem less serious

Perhaps you would consider compiling into a less expressive format when you complete it. I’d love to dig into it but the context switching distractions as well as the difficulty curve of the material and style are high. So it is bookmarked but deprioritized.

Your writing and content I'd say that's of more quality that most journalists

It’s a good design, props for doing something different and interesting.

I liked it.

author here. the irony is enigma protector's documentation literally explains how to add runtime checks to your payload. they just... didn't read it

And I'm glad they didn't. Protecting the installer keeps honest people honest. Protecting the runtime after installed means reduced performance and/or support headaches. That said I hope the developer didn't pay too much for this copy protection when some bespoke checks on the installer would have sufficed.

I'm just glad they didn't use iLok. It's been a pain for me as a legitimate user of a few iLok protected plugins.

Indeed. Some software DRM is so “effective” I’ve been permanently locked out of software I purchased.

I'm confused, then why does your article throw shade at both the protection software and the VST?

It sounds like you didn't find any issues with either of them, except that the VST vendor chose not to protect the thing you were hoping to crack?

I think he should be mainly throwing it at the VST vendor, as opposed to the protection software, since the main issue in the article comes from the vst vendor protecting the installer but not the actual software (that said, they also show that the protection software is fairly trivial to hook and bypass)

Question: Why go through the effort of removing most of the key throughout the article just to have it in a chunk of code in the article anyways? I'm not trying to throw shade here, I am legitimately curious about the reasoning

Runtime checks aren't an impossible effort to defeat either. If you're into this stuff, you should build a plugin with them yourself and then figure out how to crack it. It's a great learning exercise.

As another commenter wrote, the protection is there to keep honest people honest, like locking the front door of your house.

It's not foolproof and doesn't need to be. It's role is to make sure respectful users know that you'd genuinely prefer they not steal your stuff (not everyone actually does care about that).

Or maybe they knew about the runtime checks, but made a decision not to add them? As others have pointed out, this plugin can be used during live performances. The last thing a plugin author wants is a reputation for their software being flaky at really bad times. A runtime copy protection check might fail for spurious reasons, who knows.